THE HIGH popes of poetry insisted on rhyme because not everybody can find a sensible partner to the word ‘thyme’.
If you can pair ‘wine’, ‘whine’ and ‘this true love of mine’ in two lines, you are fine.
Other than that, eat sh*t, kabayong malupit!
So they used words like “thine” and “thou” and “fucketh”.
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And then, the Industrial Revolution came.
Coco Chanel invented the little black dress for every woman.
Anyone can now work, and get rich.
Poor shepherds have a choice to work in a factory.
And if they are determined, with industry, they can study.
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Girls may not be just chamberpot maids anymore.
They don’t have to be in arranged marriages any longer.
They can be prostitutes!
I mean, if they want to.
A little black dress is all they needed to look classy and elegant.
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That’s what the revolution was all about.
Power to the people. Power to the masses.
And to further democratize things, modernists rebelled.
Against kings, against F.U.C.K., against Church, against Poetry.
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They wanted poetry to be accessible.
They wanted to free themselves from the rules of the institution.
Rules of versification.
From the rules of the ruling class. Of the high popes of lit.
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Those who didn’t make it to the secret order of poets, wanted a new order.
That’s what you do if you feel you are an outsider.
You build a new world.
A new order.
A new world order.
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The Old World valued high diction, flowery words, secret symbols, end rhymes, specific meters, metrical lines.
The Modernists said, “Eff that!”
No more forms, no more sonnet rules!
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Free verse, blank verse, and someone even wanted something called Reverse.
But that last one didn’t really pick up.
Nobody remembers whatever that Reverse Movement was all about anymore.
Did it even exist?
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So they dropped the formal rhymes.
They abandoned the metrical lines.
They dropped the sing-song meters.
The pentas and the tetras.
The iambic, trochaic, spondaic, and all that crap.
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But if you strip music and meter from Old Poetry, New Poetry would need something unique to make it attractive.
To keep its Art status symbol. Its Art status quo.
To make its Art status… complicated.
To distinguish it from the fisherman’s speech, and the fishmonger wives’ gossip.
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And so the new poets invented Imagery.
Mental pictures, little riddles called metaphors.
Literary devices. Calling the pen a sword.
Calling the penis a pen signing with semen and sperm.
White ink. Really? Gross!
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So, yeah. Images.
Figures of speech.
Instead of just pleasurable sounds from florid language, Poetry has now become an intellectual exercise to imagine what is being said.
To find the needle in the haystack.
It’s like a test.
Of passing a camel through the eye of a needle.
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So, modern poems had to have some meaning.
Not just a silly rhyme and rhythm like Old McDonald’s farm. E-I-E-I-O!
Not just an expression of personal feelings and confession of desires.
Not just a love song to win the girl or the boy. Or the goat!
(Yeah, those vaqueros do goats, not ghosts! But I digress.)
Anyway, Meaning!
Like in the red wheelbarrow.
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Meaning that is perhaps cloaked, perhaps a mystery to be revealed.
Perhaps fooling us for something that isn’t really there.
Poets thought hiding the meaning is a fine game in poetry.
The idiots also thought that finding the hidden meaning is fun for others.
Go stick a needle in your eye!
But really, poetry just became work after that.
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And who gets to call it poetry?
Anyone! Why shouldn’t it be?
If anyone can now write a poem, anyone can call anything they write a poem.
And that’s why we have so many sh*t going around. (To be continued) (500tinaga@gmail.com/PN)
